August
29, 2000:

Below is the eulogy I read at my mother's funeral
this past Saturday. More than this I probably can't say. And on that note
I wrap August for ContraPositive. More when I think of something worth
relating.

TO THE ETERNAL MEMORY OF

VICTORIA A. DUNTEMANN

1924 - 2000

I'm about to attempt perhaps the hardest thing I have ever done: Say
goodbye to one of my parents for the last time. I had had surgery the
day my father died, and at his funeral I was shot full of morphine and
could barely think, much less stand and speak. This time the way is clear.
I'll do my best, but if I have some trouble, bear with me. I only get
this one shot.

Victoria Albina Pryes was born December 16, 1924, in the little town
of Stanley, Wisconsin. She was the tenth and youngest child of poor Polish
immigrant parents, and her early years were hard indeed. Two of her sisters
died as children, and another died in childbirth as a young woman. They
often lived in rickety farmhouses, sometimes with no glass in the windows.
When she was 12 and bathing in a washtub in the middle of the kitchen
floor, ball lightning came down the chimney and bounced all around her
without hurting heronly one of the many great stories she told us
through the years. Even a life in poverty is not without wonder.

She was a Catholic, and one of monumental faith. Without knowing the
word, she was a mystic, and had visions of the God she believed in. After
her first love paid the highest price for our freedom in World War II,
she took it as a sign that she would never marry.

Then, after the War, she met this other guy: Not real tall, but strong,
and funny, and kind. Not Polish, eithera scary thing in itself.
But Frank loved her, and she loved him, and when he asked her to marry
him, she was terrified…but she said yes.

The night before her wedding, she was so afraid that she cried, and she
asked God what she should do. And in her dreams she saw a vision of Jesus
in the guise of the Sacred Heart, and He said, Frank is a good man. Marry
him.

She did. (I know of two people, at least, who are damned glad of that.)

They raised us well: Mother the cautious one, who worried, and father
the confident one, who knew that everything would work out. Their love
was the rock upon which we all stood, and it might have lasted for many
more years. But when I was 16 and Gretchen only 12, our father was struck
with cancer, and although he fought for ten years, at last it took him.

Mother was a nurse all her life, caring for her husband, for her children,
and for total strangers. She did what she could for her Frank, but losing
him broke her spirit, and she was never the same. Mother confided to my
sister once that all she would ask of Heaven was to see God and have her
husband back. Nothing else mattered in the slightest. There was faith
and love in her declining years, but in truth not a great deal of hope.

I want to close with a strong statementa very strong statementbut
one that may not seem very strong without a little explanation. I want
to draw on the work of my patron sort-of-a-saint, Lady Julian of Norwich,
who was perhaps the original gonzo optimist. Even people who don't know
her name have probably heard her signature affirmation: "All will be well.
And all will be well. And all manner of thing will be well." Lady Julian
is not a canonized saint because she dared to report a vision she had,
of a mysterious Great Thing that God will do on the Last Day. On that
day, the gates of hell will lie broken and open, and hell itself will
be abandoned and empty, because the damned, the fallen angels, and even
Satan himself will have repented and been redeemed.

"But my Lord," Julian protested in aghast of this vision, "that is impossible!"

This is a vision of a God so powerful that eternal punishment or even
final extinction are beneath Him. Only total and infinite redemption will
do. Julian's vision is of a God so patient that he will wait as long as
it takes for Satan himself to say, "All right, Big Guy, you win. I give.
Take me back?"

And it's a vision of a God so loving that He will.

The greatest gift my sister and I received from our parents was that
strange melding of my mother's unbreakable faith and my father's irrepressible
optimism. We take Julian's vision as our own, and we know in our very
guts that she was right.

Now, I said all that just to say this: That the God Gretchen and I believe
in has given our mother back to our father, so that they can heal one
another in the ineffable light of the Beatific Vision. And so, for the
first time in thirty-two years, after all that pain, and suffering, and
death, and separation, and loneliness, all…

…is finally…

…well.

Mother, as you always told us as we left the house, we now tell you: Go
with God.

August
28, 2000:

Oddly, I was also at the hospital when my father
died, back in January 1978, but with a twist: I was across town having
abdominal surgery. So I could not attend his wake, and was barely functional
at his funeral, of which I remember little except being held up by the
armpits while the VFW fired a 21-gun salute in his honor. So my mother's
wake was truly a new experience. My aunt and godmother Kathleen Duntemann
died last summer, but had expressly demanded not to have a wake,
and so it was. Not since I lost my last grandparent in 1967 had I been
to a wake that cut so close to the heart.

I don't think Aunt Kathleen quite understood wakes. She thought they
were painful for the living, but to the contrary: I had never felt so
cared about as I did that evening, thronged with people I had not seen
in yearssometimes many yearswho had somehow heard the
news and came, some across distances I would have considered prohibitive.
Mrs. Schroeder, who had been den mother for Den 9 when I was a Cub Scout
in the early 1960s, was there. My cousin Tony Pryes drove down all the
way from Green Bay, and two of my father's cousins drove up from the very
far southern suburbs. Most remarkably, the informal email network had
managed to gather six members of the Fox Patrol, who had truly not all
been in the same room since 1966, in honor of my poor mother, who had
stolidly and tolerantly hosted the noisy bunch in our family room when
I was in junior high.

Perhaps it would be different at the wake of a person who had died tragically
young. But mother had had her threescore and ten plus change, and had spent
those last few years wasting away from an obscure dementia related to Alzheimer's
Disease. So in some sense it was a merciful release from pain, and there
was a strange (if quiet) undercurrent of joy behind it. Perhaps more than
anything else, my mother's wake reminded me that the people we love drop
out of the game, one by one, and we should take pains to appreciate those
we have while we have them.

August
27, 2000:

It's
been a little ragged since last Monday, when my mother took a turn for the
worst, and Gretchen and I bundled her off to the Emergency Room at Lutheran
General Hospital here in Niles, Illinois. It was sheer chance that I was
here in the Chicago area, but Tuesday morning she fell into a coma, and
late Tuesday afternoon the nurse called us while we were home having supper
to say that we should come back to the hospital. Gretchen was still at work,
but Carol and I hustled over there. We were there for only minutes when
it finally hit me that mother was no longer breathing. Carol gripped her
wrist, shrunken almost to bones from the dementia syndrome, and I saw the
tears welling up in my wife: Victoria Duntemann was gone. That's about all
I can write this evening. I'll have to get this out in chunks, which won't
perhaps be coherent or in the right order (all this happened days ago, but
today is the first day I can think straight) so bear with me.

August
21, 2000:

Having
fairly predictable trouble getting new files up to the new Web site here.
You'd think we'd have this figured out by now, but there it is, a question
hanging molten in the air since the days when I was passing plain text over
300 baud modems for Xerox in 1979: Why is it so damned hard to connect?
I could flame for the rest of the nightbut I could use some sleep.
(And you won't read this until I figure it out!)

August
19, 2000:

Off
to Chicago, for a couple of professional conferences, including (although
maybe this isn't quite "professional") the World Science
Fiction Convention. ContraPositive may be a little sparse for a bit, since
my ability to upload HTML to this site from remote locations is untested
and unproven. But I'll give it a shot.

August
18, 2000:

I'm
looking for a utility that can read Outlook .pst personal folder files and
export them in some other format, ideally as an ASCII comma-delimeted database.
I have almost 20,000 messages in my .pst file, which has now grown to 165
megabytes in size. A body of data that large needs to be in a database,
which is what I'm creating with Aardmarksa generalized content database
for bookmarks, mail, newsgroup postings, digital camera images, and so on.
The database program also includes client code for the two major Internet
non-Web mechanismsmail and newsand organizes everything against
a common hierarchy. I'm writing it because I need it badly, and once it's
done I'll give it to everybody else too. In the meantime, anybody got some
Delphi code that reads .pst files?

August
17, 2000:

The
cover story of the same issue of Atlantic Monthly I mentioned yesterday
(8/16/2000) is a must-read for anyone with more than a passing interest
in the Napster online music controversy. Most particularly, pay attention
to the author's description of how the economics of modern music publishing
work. I'm a book publisher and an author, and because I'm in a "rights"
business should therefore support the record companiesbut no way,
mon. Those people (the Big Five record labels) have hugely abused
the concept of copyright, and basically steal the rights of the music that
they publish, taking copyright and never giving it back, gathering money
made by small bands and basically handing it to big bands that they choose
(for generally arbitrary reasons) to promote, charging artists for things
that book publishers absorb as part of the risk of doing business, and other
things that are not only unethical but quite simply evil. What sympathy
I might have had for the record industry (which has basically devolved to
five immense companies plus impoverished debris) is just gone. My take on
the big labels: Break 'em up. Let's revisit music copyright, and
rebuild the music business so that the people who actually make the music
make the money.

August
16, 2000:

I'm often lumped in with traditionalists and
even conservatives (sometimes for no better reason than my thinking body
piercings are ukky) but in truth I have very little use for the culture
of the recent past. (I admire certain ancient cultures much the same way
that I admire the beauty of Devonian dragonflies encased in amber, knowing
that they couldn't even breathe the air if they were alive today.) The
Fifties, much worshipped by cultural conservatives, particularly disgust
me. About the best I can say for those years is that we weren't killing
one another quite so much, but that's about where it ends. We were extremely
good at hating back then, and particularly bad at lovingthat is
to say, loving unselfishly, and especially loving strangers.

The legendary civility of the Fifties was paper-thin, something that
becomes quickly apparent to anyone who looks beyond the "Father Knows
Best" cultural icons and reads the unsentimental biographies of the
period. A good short example lies in the September 2000 issue of the Atlantic
Monthly. The writer, a man only two weeks younger than I, describes
his early life as one of fourteen children. The article "Fourteen"
describes a tepid marriage between two selfish people, who raised fourteen
children but wouldn't even eat dinner in the same room with themand
whose mother disowned all of them in her will. Yes, such extreme situations
were uncommon, but I recall "smelling" households like that
as a child, when visiting friends. Once, in the basement of a mutual friend's
house, we heard yelling up above, and Paul leaned over to me and whispered,
"There is no love in this house." And he was right. There was
responsibility, and civility, and the meeting of physical needs. But no
love. Another time, at another friend's home, his mother saw us sorting
our treasures gleaned from an afternoon sifting the sands at Foster Beach,
among which I had found a sand-weathered fragment of someone's upper plate.
"Jeff, throw that out!" she told me. "That might have been
in a nigger's mouth!" Pondering telling a 13-year-old child such
a thing these days gives me the chills, but such blatant racism made almost
no one twitch back then.

Plenty of bad things came out of tumult of the Sixties, but what we did
accomplish back then was break the back of parlor-acceptable hatreds, and
of scurrilous assumptions that had stood for centuries: That women were
the property of men, that dark-skinned people were at best inferior and
at worse dangerous, that sex was something that women traded for a roof
over their heads, that war could be waged by national powers for any reason
or no reason at all. The problems we face nowespecially that aching
vacancy of the spirit that comes of the rootless worship of material goodsseem
daunting, but until we undid the foulness behind the smiling faces of the
Fifties, we had no way to see even which direction we were going. I find
the generation of teens now coming of ageGeneration Y?tremendously
reassuring. The few that shoot the guns make all the noise. But it's the
ones who heal the wounds whom we should be watching, and when I watch them
I know that we've turned some kind of a corner, and that the way is bright
ahead.

August
15, 2000:

While the giants of instant messaging (IM) battle
over whose protocols will become the industry standard, and (more significantly)
whose IM servers will be open to communications with whose IM clients,
an open source alternative hopes to trump everybody simply by being open...and
therefore compatible with all clients and all servers.

This is Jabber, and the two sites you should read are www.jabber.com
and www.jabber.org. The .com site
is the "user" site, which explains the Jabber concept and contains
pointers to finished clients and servers. The .org site is for developers,
and contains technical information on the Jabber protocols, as well as
pointers to various open source projects related to the Jabber system.
I'm please to point out that the very first Windows Jabber client was
written, not in C++, but in Delphi. For details see http://winjab.sourceforge.net/.
The Jabber system is architected in layers, and no matter what IM protocols
eventually hit critical mass, the Jabber system will be able to fold them
in and use them.

I hope to build IM capabilities into my Aardmarks client program, and will
probably borrow from the Winjab project. The Jabber system has better than
average documentation for something like this, and if you're the least bit
interested in the future of IM, you'd benefit from taking a look at it.

August
14, 2000:

Somebody asked me to put down my list of the
ten most annoying pop songs in history. It sounds like one of those usual
party game things, but when I sat down and meditated on the question,
the list turned out interesting indeed. Here you go, worst first:

Feelings (Morris Albert)

I've Been to Paradise (But I've Never Been to Me) (Charlene)

My Sharona (The Knack)

I Enjoy Being a Girl (Flower Drum Song)

Watching Scotty Grow (Bobby Goldsboro)

I Am Woman (Helen Reddy)

Color My World (Chicago)

Louie, Louie (Kingsmen)

My Way (Frank Sinatra)

Honey (Bobby Goldsboro)

Poor Bobby Goldsboro, heh-heh. He had to work to get on this list twice,
but work he did. They don't make 'em like "Honey" anymoreand
thank the Big Guy Upstairs for that!

(Now, let's not even start talking about opera!)

August
13, 2000:

Stumbled
upon an interesting "vertical" search engine, vertical along an
unusual axis: It only indexes Adobe PDF documents. This is indeed useful,
especially for electronics freaks like me, because these days nearly all
electronic component manufacturers publish spec sheets in PDF format and
post them on the Web. For example, if you want a set of characteristic curves
for the IRF511 or the 2N7000 (as I did yesterday during some routine research)
just dial up http://searchpdf.adobe.com
and enter a query that will take you right to the goods. First rate.

August
12, 2000:

Everybody's off placing the blame for our Age
of Rage everywhere but where it belongs: Lack of sleep. I'm not kidding.
A hundred fifty years ago, our ancestors got an average of ten hours of
sleep a night, because candles and lamp oil (much of which came to us
from rendered whales!) were expensive. The most economical thing to do
when the sun went down was...sleep. These days, most people I know (especially
those with children) say they get about six hours of sleep per night,
often less. That's 40% less than what people got in the 1800s.

It's still not entirely clear what all sleep does for us, nor how every
part of it works. (This is especially true for dreams, which fascinate
me. We may in fact sleep so that our minds can dream undisturbed by reality.)
But it is abundantly clear that sleep deprivation has its price, on health
and sanity. Carol and I have succeeded in living balanced, happy lives
and staying deeply in love all these years by getting between eight and
nine hours of sleep per night, whatever it takes. Now and then
we "catch up" and go for ten. Yes, it's a horrible waste of
hours of my life that I will never have againbut I have lost enough
sleep to know that the consequences of trying to reap those "wasted"
hours are far worse.

It sounds ghoulish, but I would like to know if that poor psycho who broke
down the cockpit door on a Southwest Airlines flight the other day and attacked
the pilotand then died on the spot of a heart attackwas severely
sleep deprived. My guess is that he was.

August
11, 2000:

It's been a bad season for toasters. I'm ready
to throw ours at the wall. It doesn't work now, and it didn't work when
I bought it, which was only a year ago. No two batches are toasted to
the same degree, irrespective of where you park the little darkness leverhell,
no two sides of a two-slice batch are toasted to the same degree. I miss
the toaster my folks got for a wedding present in 1949. It was way cool
deco and had little swirly loops on its sides (although almost everything
else did in 1949, for that matter) and made a sharp little tick when it
was ready to pop so you could put the paper down and get ready to grab
the perfectly toasted Wonder Breads as they erupted out the top. It lasted
for forty years, and we dumped it only after somebody knocked it off the
counter and the bottom plate shattered, releasing most of a lifetime of
near-toxic preservative-laden Wonder Bread crumbs into the ecosphere.

We just can't make toasters toast anymore, and I think I know why: Today's
toasters are addicted to inappropriate technology. I don't need a microprocessor
in my toaster. Stupid appliances take orders better, and don't feel the
need to be creative. Viz: I was cruising a catalog yesterday hunting
down a replacement and saw a toaster that imprints a cute panda bear face
on the side of every toasted slice. This is supposed to make kids want
to eat their toast, but I have my doubts. Food that looks at you is a
bad idea. The best thing I can saw about going to a raw bar is that oysters
don't have eyes.

Case in point: When I was eight and my sister was four, my mom worked PMs
three days a week, and on those days the old man would make supper. He would
often bring home whole smoked chubs. He taught me how to parse mine, and
would cut up my sister's for her. I took great delight in parking the severed
fish heads on the edge of my plate (often on a foundation of macaroni and
cheese) so that they were looking right at her. She would scream, and the
old man would swear, reach out one thumb and spin my plate so that they
were looking at me instead. Once he spun it so fast that the fish heads
flew off by centrifugal force and landed in my lap, except for one that
the dog caught on the fly. I didn't see my sister laugh that hard again
until the first season of Seinfeld.

August
10, 2000:

Hey, I was right about Everything. (Read the
August 9 entry before you read this one.) I'm a very good pastiche artist
(meaning I can imitate a literary style after reading enough of it) and
I wrote a short humorous node on Everything about people who scribble
in the margins of dollar bills. It was wry, it was brief, it was slightly
snotty, but it was very much in the spirit of most eveything on Everything.
Bingo! In addition to 8 votes it got "cooled" (meaning that
one of the Powers had decided that it was worthy of the special Cool award)
and picked up five extra points plus a permanent slot in the Cool Archive.
(And this for an Old Bald Guy.) I now have 22 XPs of the 50 required to
ascend to Level 2. By contrast, my short factual entry on the Algonquin
Round Table got no votes, nor did my short-short SF story "Stormy
vs. the Tornadoes", which, while humorous, is not particularly cool.
(I posted that after spotting a node in which somebody commented that
tornadoes seem to have a particular taste for mobile home parks. Yup,
heh-heh.) I may try a few more things, but I'm definitely getting the
picture. Encouragingly, a separate node I wrote that suggested a balancing
award for Objectivity (in addition to the existing award for Coolness)
received 6 votes.

It would be a lot of fun to attempt a system like this with a different
set of parameters. The basic mechanism (turning content creation into a
kind of role-playing computer game) is fascinating, and worth some additional
study.

August
9, 2000:

I stumbled upon an interesting Web site yesterday,
and I've been poking at it. The site is Everything (www.everything2.com)
and it almost defies description. Its original intent is remarkably like
my very ancient concept for the "Virtual Encyclopedia of Absolutely
Everything" that I described in PC Techniques before the Web
was more than a few months old, and before I ever saw it. Everything is
something like the Web in miniature, a hypertext matrix of text (no images)
all inside a single server: Users create "nodes", which are
short writeups hyperlinked to other nodes within the server. Its founders
wanted people to capture their knowledge and link it to other knowldge,
and some of that is certainly going on. But the noise level is high, and
a huge number of nodes are adolescent crudity, self-referential insider
chatter, or simple nonsense.

Apart from its notion of "soft links," which is a peculiarly
intriguing feature I don't have room to describe here (maybe later in
the month if things get dull), what's interesting about Everything is
its system for peer review of nodes. Once you've posted at least 25 nodes
and have had your nodes voted on favorably by enough of the old timers,
you become an old timer with the power to vote on nodes penned by others.
As you accumlate XPs (experience points) you ascend through twelve levels
like dans in karate, from Initiate through things like Scribe and Crafter,
to PseudoGodhead. The higher you get, the more votes you can cast per
day, and the more you can influence the quality and shape of the system.

This is a very cool concept. Getting experience points is tough, and
takes awhile. I accumulated seven XPs in my first two days, after having
spent a couple of hours writing and linking four items. I've got a few
more ideas I'll probably post tomorrow, but in truth, if you're even going
to get to Level 2, you're going to have to spend a huge amount
of time and effort on the system.

So why is there so much nonsense on Everything? Having spent some hours
cruising through the matrix (which someone on Everything insightfully described
as "like flying through the human collective unconscious") I can
only conclude that that's what its members enjoy, and what they want. Everything
is not an encyclopedia. It's a community, and a pretty tight one,
at that. Nodes get points more for being cool than for being useful, so
what you get is a lot of cool and a lot less useful. I don't begrudge them
that, and I confess I enjoyed the diversion, but it's not an encyclopedia.
Still, one could build a Virtual Encyclopedia on that model. Everything
(in the generic sense) depends on how you incent your content creators.
You get what you give points for.

August
7, 2000:

I got my equatorial mount castings back from
the foundry, and now I have to machine one of them. (I had two cast so
I would have a spare. Never did this before.) Photo of the raw casting
is at left.

These are big chunks of aluminum, nicely cast via an automated sand foundry
specializing in nonferrous metals. My first task will be to center drill
them so that I can spin them on my lathe. That involves some nontrivial
center finding. After that, I have to figure out how to sneak a tool bit
ino a very tight spot, where the center of the casting's disk portion touches
the dead center in the tailstock. More on the weekend, when I can cool down
the garage on cheaper juice and have at it.

August
6, 2000:

Several news articles (including one in InfoWorld)
have confirmed the grumbles I've heard and provide an extremely potent
reason not to buy HP computers: The OS recovery CDs are limited in unacceptable
ways. They are keyed to various parts of the hardware; if something eats
your hard drive and you're forced to physically replace it, you may not
be able to reinstall the OS from the CD. And if you have to change the
motherboard, you could similarly out of luck. The details depend on what
machine and what OS you have. This really surprises and disturbs me, as
I swear by HP printers and scanners. Dell doesn't pull such tricks, nor
Compaqat least they didn't the last time I acquired machines from
those companies. (I currently favor Dell.)

This is a very stupid move irrespective of whether it's a Microsoft tactic
or an HP tactic. If people buy a machine and can't reinstall the OS from
the "legit" copy after a meltdown, they will feel no compuction
about stealing a copy somewhere. Why promote piracy of your own products?
And it'll be a cold day in hell before I buy an HP desktop without a backup
copy of the OS that won't stick its tongue out at me.

Microsoft needs some serious competition. Keep an eye on HelixCode. (http://www.helixcode.com)
My hunch is that they will be the source of the long-awaited Linux desktop
breakthrough. And HPshame on you! Find out who's behind that decision
and fire their butts bigtime. The tech community expects better of you than
that.

August
5, 2000:

I happened upon a Napster clone the other day
that is unremarkable except for its iconic theme. The program is IMesh
(http://www.imesh.com) and the iconic
theme is...ladybugs. When the client is connected to the server through
your Net connection, a red ladybug appears in your taskbar tray. When
an instant message comes in, it jumps up on its hind legs and says, "hi."
When the server breaks the connection, the ladybug in the tray rolls over
on its back, turns a sickly yellow, and kicks its little legs in the air.
When one of your contacts (equivalent to people on a Napster hotlist)
is "away" and not accepting instant messages, there are z's
over that contact's ladybug icon, indicating that it's "asleep."

Maybe I'm easily amused, but damn, I love this business!

August
4, 2000:

Here's a protocol for testing whether past-life
regression is real or not: Separately engage the services of four or five
regression therapists without telling them that anything special's going
on. Furthermore, tell them not to discuss the results of the regression
sessions with you, but instead record them carefully and seal them after
each session. (This may give it away--but what the heck, it's a necessary
part of the scientific method.) Then go to each of them and have them
regress you through at least five lives. When it's all over, open and
correlate the "lives" described. The five lives should be recorded
in the same order, and they should be recognizably the same lives across
all five therapists. Unless they are, I'd find it hard to believe that
such past life regressions are in fact real experiences, and not something
as simple as exercises of the unconscious imagination. A New Age friend
of mine tells that that's not how it works: Instead of experiencing lives
sequentially during regression, we dip into them randomly. One final check
then: As best we can determine, the lives recorded must not overlap in
time. Can one soul live in two bodies at once? I wouldn't think so.

Now, this is a pretty obvious test, and as far as I can see nobody's ever
done it. Why not? If I were a hypnotic subject (I've tried and can't be
put under for some reason) I would do it like a shot. My guess is that all
parties involved are way too afraid it would discredit the doctrine of reincarnation,
which I find pretty ridiculous.

August
3, 2000:

I
still tinker with electronics when time allows, and recently I bought a
selection of surface mount devices (SMDs) just to see what they were like
to handle. These are minuscule electronic parts without wire leads, designed
to be soldered in place by robotic arms, directly to the circuit board.
It's scary how small the damned things are. And the physics puzzles me as
well: How do you make a .01 ceramic capacitor the size of a flake of dandruff?
(Literally about one millimeter by two.) It's unclear how to solder them
without holding them down, and it's impossible to hold them down without
some sort of needle probe hinged from above. Will have to work on that.
Will report back later.

August
2, 2000:

Flew
back from a speaking gig in Denver today, and it was disconcerting to see
this brown layer of smoky haze at about 25,000 feet. Half of the West is
on fire, and the smoke is everywhere above us. The skies here in Phoenix,
usually so clear, have an obscuring haze that has been with us for a couple
of weeks now. I have my big 10" F6.7 Newtonian scope in working order
again, but it was depressing to strap it into its cradle and see almost
nothing. Drought conditions here are severe; small animals are eating everything
that's still alive. The local squirrels, in fact, are biting off the silk
blossoms from a pot of artificial flowers on the patio shelf and stuffing
them into their cheek pouches. There must be easier ways to get some fiber
in your diet...